The small house my parents bought in our new home of Indianapolis happened to be within a couple of miles of the city’s two largest Jewish synagogues. Consequently, a Jewish community center was just blocks from our house, and the neighborhoods near us were heavily populated with Jewish families. The daily backyard pickup basketball games would generally turn out to be some combination of Greenberg, Silverstein and Cohen against Daniels and the Rifkin twins. The public grade school down the street was probably one-third Jewish. The district’s junior high and high schools were similar, and given in large part to the high standards my Jewish friends’ families insisted on, among the nation’s finest at the time.
As much as I admired my Jewish friends’ grades and study habits, I marveled even more at the values with which many were raised. On Halloween, when I was out practicing minor vandalism and raking in all the candy I could carry home, many of my Jewish classmates were out collecting donations for UNICEF. As an incensed nation grieved for three young civil rights volunteers killed in Mississippi in 1964, we were unsurprised to learn that two of the victims who had been working for equality in the South were Jewish.
It has been noted that, for those alive in the decades after World War II, the Holocaust and its lessons were not merely remembered but vividly so. One of the valiant Bielski brothers — a trio leading Jewish partisan resistance against the Nazis in German-occupied Poland — lived in Indy until his death. An Auschwitz survivor in nearby Terre Haute named Eva Kor managed, astonishingly, as her books and a film documentary described, to forgive the infamous Josef Mengele, a doctor who had conducted medical experiments on her and her twin sister. Young and old, Jew and gentile alike, we had learned what the worst form of racism, the “oldest hatred,” looked like.
And in the summer between high school and college, where I wound up having two Jewish roommates, the Six-Day War exploded in 1967, reminding the world, as it was just reminded yet again on Oct. 7, of the implacable determination of Israel’s neighbors to destroy it and its people, if at all possible.
The college I attended, like many others, had discriminated blatantly against Jews for much of its history, and was only then admitting and atoning for it. No one raised in such an era, particularly as I had been, could imagine what has come to pass — a time when large numbers of supposedly educated Americans would cheer on those who gleefully slaughtered Jewish people, even infants.
Now, to see so many such institutions of higher education wallowing in moral confusion and hypocrisy is cause for dejection at how far the sector has fallen, and how little many young Americans know of essential history once so immediate and universally understood.
It isn’t just the students on many campuses who have a flawed understanding of Israel’s history and a warped moral sensibility. By now, too many of those running these institutions have, to their detriment, spent their adult lives closeted with people with views identical to their own, but vastly different from a majority of their fellow citizens. It came as a shock to them that their moral-equivalence dithering over Israel’s right to self-defense met with such outrage.
In trying to make amends, they found themselves in a hole of their own excavation. After pontificating so often about “microaggressions,” “hostile environments” and “hate speech” of vastly lesser virulence and almost never true violence, they could not suddenly remain institutionally mute about the real items. Having suppressed and “canceled” speech at variance with the dogmas dominant on their campus, they had no answer for those who called, unwisely in my opinion, for the suppression of speech or the outright banning of organizations espousing hatred and endorsing atrocity.
But maybe this disgraceful moment can be at least partially redeemed if it encourages some self-awareness in these administrators and reduces some of the arrogance that has caused increasing numbers of Americans to turn away from attending college altogether. Higher ed has operated for too long in a homogenous, non-diverse bubble of groupthink. America would benefit if that bubble were burst by the sudden discovery of a larger world of people who see things very differently.
